If you want to verify if DigitalOcean itself is running Cloudflare, you can just: curl --head https://www.digitalocean.com. As for verifying the droplet, you would have to do the same for a site you know is using DigitalOcean (I don't know of any).

I'm unsure if the droplets themselves running Cloudflare even matters if the site you have to go through to get the droplets runs Cloudflare to begin with.

As for my recommended hosting service, I'd say either Gandi or Njalla. There's also 1984 Hosting, but I can't vouch for it because I haven't used it yet.

I'm not only new to this community, but I'm also new to lemmy in general. I would like to be a moderator in the future though.

Good suggestions, but I don't think firejail should be recommended. My reasoning is because firejail requires suid, which can open your system up to privilege escalation holes.

Thanks for sharing, it was a good read.

If you don't want to run your own email server, you might want to look into using Migadu. A quick note is that I don't use use Migadu personally, but I've heard great things about it from Drew DeVault.

I've never been a fan of ProtonMail, but this is just disappointing.